Photo of the Month

Photo of the month: September

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Running behind again. Just getting sorted out after the flood crises and hope to catch up on my photo of the month posts. The photo below is of a drop of milk falling into a glass of water and illuminated by gelled speed lights. The speed lights are set on very low power which has the effect of shortening the duration of the flash so it will freeze motion. The speed lights were triggered when the drop passed through a laser beam. I have a background in electronics and the laser trigger was a home made unit which connected to a timing unit. The photo is taken in a darkened room, I open the shutter on the camera, squeeze the milk drop out of an eyedropper, the drop breaks the laser beam which fires the speed lights after a preset delay, then the shutter is closed. Took quite a few shots to get it all to work, it was quite a pain as once the water was contaminated with a single drop of milk everything had to be cleaned and set up again as the single drop of milk in the water diffused the flash enough to spoil the whole effect.

High speed photography

Photo (s) of the month August

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Running late again, as they say the older you get the faster time passes, I have found this to be true. These couple of of photos from a series were for a client of mine that wanted to sell his Dodge Dakota R/T. I tried to capture some of that 250 horsepower aura that is a part of this classic American pick up. These photos were processed with Photomatix and a little extra processing in Lightroom 3. I have had Photomatix for some time and found that the images it produces look a bit overdone. But with images of vehicles it gives a great effect. Most of the photos of this vehicle were taken just before a storm on a school oval. The sky was dramatic, the green grass and lack of objects near the vehicle produced favorable reflections on the glossy black body. In one of the images I had to remove a reflect of a small ladder that I used to get a couple of high view shots, it was about 10 meters away, I was astounded at just how well it was reproduced on the tailgate of the Dakota. If you have to photograph vehicles keep an eye out for unwanted reflections. I also use a polarizer on almost all the images in this series. The polarizer helps control the reflections in the paintwork and windows. You can view more images at Vehicle Phtography click the icon at the lower right hand corner to view full screen.

Photo of the Month: July

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A few weeks ago while on a week holiday in Dunkeld  I photographed this old home. The image was taken with a Singh-Ray Gold-N-Blue polarizer, hence the strange colour cast. I processed the file in Adobe Lightroom followed with some tweaks in Photoshop CS5, using the content aware feature to remove the power line. Then back into Lightroom for the final crop and a couple of graduated filters. The shot was not taken under ideal light, in fact it was very poor light, but serves to show what you can do with filters and modern software. Before and after images below.

Before

After

Photo of the Month: June

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This month I will explain some of the processes involved in the photo of the month.
I borrowed my young sons pair of shiny silver magnets, feeling their smoothness I imagined them being photographed on a reflective surface. The silvery appearance needed to dominate. Placing them on a black high gloss acrylic surface would reflect their silver finish but still give contrast to the image. To aid in the composition they needed to be placed of centre, perhaps using the rule of thirds. I had a very clear idea in my head as to what the final image would look like.
I first tried to photograph them indoors, bouncing my flash off the ceiling to soften the light. I found it too hard to control the reflections and the reflections that were happening in the magnets and in the black acrylic just did not enhance the image.
The sun was almost setting outside and the light was quite soft so I thought I would try outside. Picking a spot under our slatted pergola, I tried a number of angles finally settling on the above composition. The lines produced by the illumination from the blue sky filtering through the wooden slats added greatly to the overall image. I chose an aperture that would just blur the reflections and used a large silver reflector to fill in the shadows and enhance the silver finish on the magnets.

100mm macro lens, f11, 0.7sec

Photo of the Month: May

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Wellington, New Zealand. This is another HDR image down near Wellington wharf as I said previously the weather was against me with grey overcast sky and intermittent rain. The rain was actually quite a help as it made the pavement stand out. This image was made up of 3 exposures then processed and enhanced in Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. I was quite happy with the final image.